A
Landscape of Lies
I
GREW UP IN a landscape of lies. As a child, I
was told that every lake in North Dakota
freezes. This isn’t true. One lake — Nelson
Lake, my home lake — doesn’t freeze.
In
the 1960s, when generational coal plants were
first built in south-central North Dakota, the
Square Butte Creek in Oliver County, a small,
squiggly stream that eventually empties into the
wide, muddy Missouri River, was dammed, and
Nelson Lake was created to help with fossil fuel
extraction.
In
childhood, I roamed the rocky shores of Nelson
Lake with worms and bobbers to catch fish with
my Grandpa Hatzenbihler. I spent hour after hour
in the shadow of the Milton R. Young Power
Plant, its blocky structure pierced with two
enormous cigarette-colored smokestacks. The
power plant was a type of
postmodern-volcano-skyscraper that framed my
life.
The
plant was always within view. On nighttime trips
back into coal country from Bismarck, where my
family would buy groceries, shop for clothing,
or go out to eat at Fiesta Villa, The Ground
Round, or The Walrus, I could clock how far we
were from home by where we were in relationship
to the glowing and blinking lights of Minnkota
Power. The lights colored low-laying clouds
amber. The power plant was an eerie Polaris that
allowed me to navigate my way toward home in the
city of Center, North Dakota…
Though
we never said it at the time, it’s clear to me
now that I grew up in a company town. Coal
colored my childhood, sponsored baseball
tournaments, fueled pancake breakfast
fundraisers, gave me food, clothing, and
shelter. It was the resource that gave eastern
North Dakota and western Minnesota electricity,
and it gave those of us that pulled it from the
ground in south-central North Dakota money, a
type of financial security in a region where,
previously, most men ranched or farmed.
North
Dakota is home to the world’s largest known
deposit of lignite coal, estimated to last
nearly eight hundred years with current
consumption rates. But with increasing calls to
leave fossil fuel development in the past, my
home power plant is now the world test site for
a new fossil fuel technology: carbon capture and
storage.
Journalist and author Taylor
Brorby writes about the lies the community he
grew up in told itself to make life next to a
power plant bearable. He worries the arrival of
a new fossil fuel technology could continue to
perpetuate those
myths. |
